This first course of the Blockchain specialization provides a broad overview of the essential concepts of blockchain technology – by initially exploring the Bitcoin protocol followed by the Ethereum protocol – to lay the foundation necessary for developing applications and programming. You will be equipped with the knowledge needed to create nodes on your personal Ethereum blockchain, create accounts, unlock accounts, mine, transact, transfer Ethers, and check balances.
You will learn about the decentralized peer-to-peer network, an immutable distributed ledger and the trust model that defines a blockchain. This course enables you to explain basic components of a blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and the chain) its operations (verification, validation, and consensus model) underlying algorithms, and essentials of trust (hard fork and soft fork). Content includes the hashing and cryptography foundations indispensable to blockchain programming, which is the focus of two subsequent specialization courses, Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications (Dapps). You will work on a virtual machine image, specifically created for this course, to build an Ethereum test chain and operate on the chain. This hands-on activity will help you understand the workings of a blockchain, its transactions, blocks and mining.
Main concepts are delivered through videos, demos and hands-on exercises.

Ministrado por

Bina Ramamurthy

Transcrição

Something this important needs to be built by all of us for all of us. You can't just have a small group of people or one kind of person building this. It's too important. Even the Internet itself is not as is as pervasively disruptive and transformative as the Internet on blockchain is going to be, because the blockchain or the Internet was and is really an ideal system for broadcasting information. That was great. That was Guttenberg's best day. But it didn't invent a way of doing transactions without having centralized authorities in there, like banks and others that have issues or like we are seeing with Facebook today. There are problems with central authorities being in control of your identity, or your information, or your transactions. But being able to democratize that and spread it all over the world, that's powerful, but it's also really powerful, which means it better be built by more than just a few knuckleheads in a building with only one perspective on things. So, it's very important that, A, these technologies are being built in open source, but not just in open source, openly governed open source, meritocracies. There are hundreds of people all over the world building the protocols for Ethereum, and Hyperledger and other things. That's the way it should be. We need more of that. We need more kinds of people. It needs to be a highly diverse group of people. What's great about blockchain is that, it's so young. There is no group of people who can tell you that you don't know what they know, that they're better than you. Anybody that tells you that they know more about this than you do, they might know a little more, but mastery is 13 years and blockchain hasn't been around that long. Right, so this is your opportunity if you are a student who isn't represented by a lot of people that look like you or think like you. This is your shot. You can get in there and you can say, "No, I'm the expert. I'm the master on this," and that's good.